Hello and welcome to this course in which we're talking about Python for impact. In this video, we're going to be talking about account access removal, why removing access to a user accounts has such an impact on an organization and its users, and how we can use Python to achieve account access removal. So access to user accounts is essential to many employees' ability to do their job, if you think about it, most employees now are working from computers, what they do on those computers can vary greatly based off of their job role, industry, etc., but a lot of the modern business has been moved to IT infrastructure, and in order to access that IT infrastructure, you need access to user accounts. That's how users can access the data stored on computers, can run the programs that are necessary for performing their roles, etc., so your access to your user account is vital for your job. If an attacker can remove this access, they can cause significant damage to the business on a variety of different ways; one impact of this loss of access is lost productivity, if you have employees that rely on access to the user accounts to do their jobs and they can't access their accounts, then they can't do their jobs, and so this causes them to lose productivity. There can also be negative customer impacts due to this loss productivity, if you're not able to perform customer service, make new sales, etc., then you may lose part of your customer base or at least have less happy customers. A second impact of account access removal is the potential for expensive remediation, so depending on how this account access is removed, it may be difficult or at least expensive to restore that access, and so the attack for account access removal for impact can end up costing the target a lot of money. Then thirdly, there's the potential for data loss, one way to remove access to a user account is to delete that account entirely, which means that the files associated with that account will be deleted as well. Depending on how thorough the attacker does this job, it's possible that the files could be restored expensive, or that they could be lost forever if the disk is wiped to the point where recovery is not possible. So these are just some of the ways in which removing access to user accounts can cause financial and other types of harm to a business. Account access can be removed in multiple different ways, and they have multiple different levels of impact and permanency, one approach, as we just mentioned is account deletion, if you delete a user account, then they can no longer gain access to it, and depending on how thorough you are, do that job, the data associated with the account might be lost forever. Another less permanent approach to removing access to user accounts is changing the password, so modern authentication and account security is often based off of user passwords, the theory being that only someone with knowledge of the user's password can access their account, and so if an attacker can gain access to a user account and change that password to something that only the attacker knows, then only the attacker can gain access to the account afterwards, assuming that you don't have administrator or someone capable of resetting the password. Under these circumstances, there's not only an impact to the organization, but there's the potential that the attacker might be able to monetize their attack by selling the ability to regain access to the user account. We're discussing this particular technique from the MITRE ATT&CK framework and the Impact tactic because we'll be looking in the next video on how we can implement account access removal using Python. Thank you.
